Keeping us in the dark

The TIPP negotiations are being conducted almost in secret, with governments and the European Parliament deliberately denied essential information. However, business lobbyists can access all areas, and do.

“Opaque” best describes the negotiations surrounding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht may insist that“there is nothing secret about this EU trade deal”. but the EU’s chief negotiator, Ignacio Garcia Bercero, promised the opposite to his US counterpart Daniel Mullaney in a letter last July: “All documents related to the negotiation or development of the TTIP Agreement, including negotiating texts, proposals of each side, accompanying explanatory material, discussion papers, emails related to the substance of the negotiations, and other information exchanged in the context of the negotiations, are provided and will be held in confidence”.

This secrecy is surprising, since it was responsible for the failure of other international treaties when the negotiations were eventually (and inevitably) revealed: the “Dracula effect” helped to kill the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998 and led to the European Parliament’s rejection of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in 2012. Yet the EU Directorate-General for trade (DG Trade) maintains that “for trade negotiations to work and succeed, you need a certain degree of confidentiality, otherwise it would be like showing the other player one’s cards in a card game”.

The European Parliament has only limited access to details of the exchanges between Washington and Brussels. The negotiators send information to only one MEP in each political group, within the Parliament’s Committee on International Trade (INTA). They are not allowed to show the documents to colleagues outside the Commission, or have them examined by external experts, despite their highly technical nature.

Member states receive the same information as MEPs, no more. In the context of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada, which is nearing conclusion, they complain that they have not been able to get hold of the main texts that have been discussed over the past five (...)